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Avaya is sprucing up its Collaborative Cloud, with features designed specifically for cloud service providers. The enhancements allow CSPs to brand their offerings, and to provide Avaya's unified communications, contact center and video services via an on-demand basis.

The cloud-based offerings -- unified-communications-as-a-service, contact-center-as-a-service and video-as-a-service -- are designed to be flexible enough for CSP customers needing to accommodate "bring your own device" environments and anywhere-anytime workforce needs. The modes of delivery include private clouds, managed services, multi-tenancy or full software-as-a-service.

Joel Hackney, senior vice president and general manager of Cloud Solutions at Avaya, said in a statement that the new Collaborative Cloud services allows CSPs to offer "differentiated" unified communications, contact center or video solutions to enterprises, with "highly flexible pricing and options for hosting and branding."

Utility Pricing

Through the Avaya Cloud, CSPs can provide a flexible pricing that resembles a utility, where the pays only for the services and time used and which can accommodate customers with dynamic needs. The Avaya Control Manager has multi-tenancy so that multiple companies can be run off the same platform, as well as an administrative segmentation tool and centralized management, and it is designed to provide overall control of what resources users can access.

The video capability is offered on a scalable platform that allows multi-vendor video collaboration. Avaya said that recent enhancements to its Scope video conferencing offer scalability and video conferencing that is designed for BYOD environments.

Also available is the company's Communications Outsourcing Solutions Express, a private cloud that Avaya, a CSP or a channel partner can host, and which can be sold under the Avaya brand or as a co-branded product. The first version of COS Express is designed specifically for use by contact center deployments, in which there are no more than 500 agents.

Introduced Last Year

The Collaborative Cloud, introduced as a single brand in 2012, is a framework for cloud-based delivery of Avaya's communication services and applications, via a private, public or hybrid solution. The Collaborative Cloud includes management by Avaya of all or part of the apps and infrastructure.

Collaboration services in the Avaya Cloud include AvayaLive Connect, a suite of hosted collaboration services providing flexible communications for businesses with unified messaging and phone communications, as well as various customer service and productivity tools.

The Cloud's Engage is an interactive 3D environment that uses avatars and spatial audio technology to enable Web conferencing for remote meetings, training, sales and support, and Automated Chat is a solution for contact centers that delivers answers through an automated system, a live agent, or both.

Last August, Avaya introduced a portfolio of cloud-ready turnkey solutions to help facilitate deployments of its Collaborative Cloud solutions. Called Avaya Collaboration Pods, they employ components from EMC and VMware to ease the installation and operation of real-time communications/collaboration environments. It also included fully integrated management and tech support, and a common interface for managing the Pods.